Gabriel Consulting Group, based in Beaverton, Ore., has finished its annual survey of Unix users, and found that IBM narrowly topped Hewlett-Packard in customer satisfaction.

Last year, IBM had a little more breathing room. But Dan Olds, a principal at the consultancy, said that Big Blue and HP are practically in a dead heat, with IBM leading in technology factors but HP winning on system quality and overall data center issues. That represents a decent jump for HP, which had slipped into third place behind Sun Microsystems last year on customer satisfaction.

The Gabriel survey quizzed 290 users in the fourth quarter of 2007 on dozens of Unix issues such as system performance, ease of integration, and operating system quality. Some findings from the survey:

• IBM won 14 categories and tied five, doing best in “Overall Technology,” “Raw System Performance,” and “Processor Performance.”
• HP won 10 categories and tied five, winning on topics such as “Easiest Integration,” “Best Initial Quality,” and “Operating System Quality.”
• Users picked Sun as being the most committed to Unix and driving Unix innovation the most.

Olds said that although Sun came in third, they did beat IBM and HP on topics such as customer loyalty and energy efficiency.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. has updated its Solaris 10 operating system (OS) today, The Solaris 10 5/08 OS, which is now available for free download.

Larry Wake, product manager for Solaris, details the new features in a video blog. Some of the features include new hardware support for systems based on AMD, Intel and SPARC processors, and increased performance and power management features for existing systems. In addition, a new feature called CPU Capping lets users set a limit on CPU usage for better management of system resources.

The new Solaris 10 also includes the ability for Solaris Containers to support virtualized environments based on earlier versions the OS - Solaris 8 and 9. This allows users running a physical instance of Solaris 8 or 9 to move those instances to containers running on a Solaris 10 system, according to Sun.

The Solaris 8 OS was originally released in February 2000, superseded by Solaris 9 OS in May 2002, and the Solaris 10 OS was initially released in January 2005.

More details on the updated version of Solaris 10 are available on Sun’s blog.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard Co. is pressuring Sun Microsystems Sparc users to abandon their aging platforms and move onto commodity HP ProLiant and Integrity servers, a strategy that has generated HP an estimated $1.5 billion in server revenue since 2004.

As part of that strategy, HP announced a new distribution agreement with Transitive Corp. today under which HP and its channel partners will be certified resellers of Transitive’s QuickTransit virtualization software. The software lets users migrate their applications from Sparc-based servers to other servers without making any code changes to applications.

HP first partnered with Transitive back in February 2007.

Transitive is currently offering QuickTransit for Solaris/Sparc-to-Linux/Itanium on HP Integrity servers. This allows users to migrate enterprise applications from SPARC-based hardware to HP Integrity servers running either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell SUSE Linux.

Secunia is a well-known Danish company that tracks security vulnerabilities and viruses for thousands of software programs and operating systems. Vendors will often use information from Secunia to show how robust and secure their software is.

Check out this comparison of vulnerability advisories from Secunia for the major Unix operating systems — AIX, HP-UX and Solaris.

This is interesting. When Sun Microsystems doubles the speed of its computers, customers don’t buy half as many, they tend to buy twice as many, according to CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
The blogging CEO says virtualization is good for the technology industry - despite the popular belief that it the consolidation benefits of virtualization cut into hardware sales.
That’s why Sun is offering the newly bundled virtualization features in Solaris 10 - from Xen to ZFS, Crossbow to Java. Solaris 10’s virtualization enables customers to consolidate the sprawling Linux, Solaris and Windows boxes laying around their datacenters, without having to pay crazy software licenses for add-on products.
“We built virtualization in to Solaris 10 not to encourage fewer computer or storage purchases, but instead, more - systems that are twice as utilized are twice as affordable,” Schwartz writes in his blog, adding that when you double the mileage of a car, more people can afford it.

When you use Solaris to consolidate lots of small, poorly utilized computers, into a smaller number of bigger computers, you may depress unit volumes, but you bulk up the configurations of the systems you sell — more memory, more cores and threads, more storage, etc., Schwartz said.

That’s great for Sun, but probably a bit disheartening for those data center managers who thought they were finally getting ahead of the game by virtualizing their data centers. Vendors are still a step ahead in line at the bank…

At the HP Technology Forum in Las Vegas this week, HP announced that it is working with Transitive Corp. to get Sun customers running Sparc-based servers over to HP’s servers based on AMD’s and Intel’s x86 chips or Intel’s Itanium processor.

Not sure if this is common knowledge or not, but since I didn’t know about it and neither did the other reporters in my general vicinity, here it is…

Sun provides a “Solaris Check Tool” on its website where users can find out relatively quickly if their x86 hardware will support Sun’s Solaris OS or not.

If a third-party driver is needed for a particular piece of hardware, the Sun Check Tool will also provide a link to the driver you need.

Sun chief Jonathan Schwartz suggested in a Q&A that Sun could start giving server hardware away and just charge for services. Responding to a question about how muchSolaris brings in service revenues, Schwartz talked about “Thumper” and finished his answer by saying:

And by the way when we start giving it away for free and simply charging 4,000 bucks a month to service it, then how would I characterize it?

When there was a follow-up question, Schwartz backed up a little bit, but not much:

Did I just preannounce that? I hope I didn’t. That’s not currently in the plan, but it is absolutely where the market is headed.

As you probably know, Sun has a pretty extensive Try and Buy program that allows users to take some of its servers — with the range going from the small x86/x64 2100 up to the big-box T2000 — on a 60-day test drive to see how they like it. Is giving the hardware away the next step?

Sun Microsystems is apparently in the midst of a project, codenamed Indiana, to make Solaris more like Linux:

It’s a tricky balance to adopt elements of Linux while preserving Solaris technology and advantages such as the promise of backward compatibility, which guarantees old software will run on new versions ofSolaris.

There’s a healthy Solaris and Linux discussion going on at Slashdot right now; it’s worth checking out. The basis of the project, led by Debian/GNU Linux distro founder Ian Murdock (who now works at Sun as its chief operating system platform strategist), is to mix features in Solaris like ZFS and DTrace into a more Linux-like OS that Linux people will like better.

It’s been a while since Sun began its OpenSolaris project. Since then, the company has been working on creating enough interest in their open source OS to compete with Linux. A recent article in Business Week looks at the pros and cons of releasing more of their products, including Solaris, under the General Public License (GPL). To many this seems like a desperate move; others see an opportunity to increase development for Sun hardware and platforms. But everyone agrees that Sun needs to do something to put Solaris in the center stage, where it arguably deserves to be (features like DTrace are getting a lot of attention). However, last years’ inclusion of Ubuntu on UltraSparc servers seems a curious move if they want OpenSolaris to take off. On the other hand, maybe as shops like Dell continue to support Ubuntu (they announced today that the Linux distribution would be offered on desktops and laptops and have more plans for developing Ubuntu servers) Sun will be forced to do something about their curious relationship with open source that makes sense — like keep up.